Zipcar OneWay: Almost the Car Rental Service We Deserve

Roundtrips-only no more: This fall, Zipcar rolls out a pilot program for one-way rentals in Boston, with the rest of the country coming soon. We hope.

Good news, car-sharers who long for freedom: This fall, Zipcar will try out a pilot program in Boston for OneWay, its initiative to allow drivers to take one-way trips. And while it might be a long way off, OneWay vice president Gita Rebbapragada tells Popular Mechanics that the company is thinking about inter-city one-way rentals, something with the potential to upend urban transportation.

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Drivers have been clamoring for one-way trips for years, Rebbapragada says. But it's also clear that Zipcar—once the plucky startup offering a welcome alternative to the woeful car-rental experience—is now the disrupted. Taxi-hailing apps like Uber and car- and ride-sharing services such as Lyft cut into the market of transporting the carless among us. And so a new way to use Zipcar is finally coming.

For the Boston-only pilot program, Zipcar members will be able to reserve a car only 30 minutes before they need it—and must designate where they're going to park when they're done. If there will be no available parking spot at the time and place a member wants one, then it won't appear as an option. "The one-way model is very complex," Rebbapragada says. "[With our current model] we can control the volume and flows of spaces." It's a stepping-stone approach for a company that's accustomed to managing an enormous fleet of cars, but cars that live in one parking space and always return there.

But it's open-ended car rentals that would be much more exciting for drivers—and much more troublesome for Zipcar. Consider the problem of Citi Bikes, the cycle-sharing program that debuted in New York City last year. Users check out a bike and have the freedom to return it to any Citi Bike location. The flip side is dealing with the whims of supply and demand. Some stations fill up with bikes, and if you're looking to return yours there, you're out of luck—you've got to find a station with empty stalls, all while the meter keeps running. Same goes for empty stations when you're there and ready to rent one.

Citi Bike uses "rebalancers"—a fancy word for guys driving trucks full of bikes—to restock popular locations that run out of bikes. Would Zipcar hire a staff of drivers to drive its cars from overstocked stations to empty ones? The company won't say much about, the proprietary solutions it's developing with the goal of freer one-way travel in mind. One thing that helps them, Rebbapragada says, is that the Avis Budget Group bought Zipcar back in March of last year, allowing Zipcar to tap into not only the big company's fleet of cars but also its big data about the movements of rental fleets.

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"There's a huge data element to this," Rebbapragada says. "There are some predictable ebbs and flows of movement. And then there are disruptive events like a storm or a baseball game at Fenway, where the patterns actually get a little more challenging to predict. The data challenge in front of us is, how do you deliver a service really consistently when you have frequent disruptive events?"

Zipcar stresses that it wants OneWay to fit into its mission of "responsible urban living." Rebbapragada's example for Boston is trips between North Station, a heavily trafficked subway stop, and South Station, the city's primary bus and regional train terminal. You can't get between the two without making a subway transfer, which is why a one-way car rental might make sense. "What we want to do is build something that's complimentary to existing urban infrastructure—public transit, bike share, etc. We want to design our product keeping those options in mind."

But if a company like Zipcar could solve the logistical problems inherent in intercity one-way travel, it could create a service that's not just a competitor with the subway, but with buses, rental cars, moving trucks, trains, and any other way people travel from one city to another. If you've been stuck on a bus lately, you've felt the hunger for a freer, better way.

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